by Daniel Pool
dog rose—A common wild rose, often found in hedges and having red flowers.
don—The colloquial term for a tutor, head of a college or fellow at Oxford or Cambridge.
donkey cart—A small cart pulled by a donkey, obviously, often used by a poor street vendor.
doorpost—One of the two posts framing a doorway from which the door itself was hung.
dormouse—A favorite pet of Victorian children. Small, docile, affectionate, these tree-dwelling animals owed their name to the fact that in the wild they spent much of the winter hibernating. Mouselike in size, squirrellike in appearance, an ideal choice for a small narcoleptic mammal at the Mad Hatter’s tea party.
double first—Someone at Oxford who got first prize both in the classics and mathematics honors exams.
double Gloucestershire—A type of cheese.
dovecote—Certain old estates had roosts for pigeons and doves. In an era when it was difficult to get fresh food in the winter, one ate the pigeons.
dowager—The name given to a widow of rank: thus, the dowager duchess of Granby.
dower—Sometimes also used to mean “dowry,” but it generally meant the part of her husband’s estate to which a wife was entitled after he died.
A Dormouse.
down—As in the “down” train. “Down” meant one was traveling away from London, which was always “up” from wherever one was in England, even if one were far north of the city. The only exception to this was Oxford and Cambridge, which were always “up” and from which one was “sent down” if one were expelled.
downs—A topographical term that really meant just the opposite. The downs were hilly upland, found especially in the more southerly portions of England. “Down” derives from the Anglo-Saxon dun, or hill.
dowry—The wealth a bride was supposed to bring to a marriage. The going rate for a woman of some rank among the aristocracy marrying a person of approximately the same level in the 1870s was about ten thousand to thirty thousand pounds.
drab—A brownish kind of color.
draft—See draught.
drag—A private stagecoach, usually pulled by four horses. Also, the brakes on a carriage.
dragoon—Originally, a dragoon was distinguished from an ordinary cavalryman because he rode into battle on horseback and then dismounted and fought on foot. His name has been derived from the pistol he used, which was supposed to send out a flame like a dragon. By the 1800s the dragoons were not very different from regular cavalry. Sergeant Troy in Far from the Madding Crowd is a member of the 11th Dragoon Guards.
draper—A man who sold cloth.
draught—Either a check or a bill of exchange. In the context of medicine or alcohol, a draught was an amount of liquid one could toss off in one swallow.
draughts—The game of checkers.
drawers—Underpants, worn by men and women, the men’s usually made from flannel or wool. Women’s (cut baggy and full) were often made up of two separate legs tied together at the waist and open below (the garments were generally knee length). When they first came in, they were considered quite racy and improper for women to wear inasmuch as previously only men had worn them.
drawing—A fox-hunting term meaning to send the hounds into a covert to find the fox and send him scampering out.
drawing room—A drawing room was used in polite society to receive visitors who came to pay formal calls during the afternoon. It also served as a place for guests to assemble before going in to dinner and as a place to which the ladies would retire after dinner and be joined by the gentlemen after the latter had imbibed their port. In the sense of an event, a drawing room was the name given to one of the occasions at St. James’s Palace at which ladies were formally presented to the monarch.
dray—A cart with no sides used for hauling heavy loads.
dress—To dress food was simply to prepare it.
dressing bell—A bell rung in fancy households before dinner to let people know that it was time to dress for the evening meal. Possibly adopted because in large country houses filled with guests it was difficult to get the word out to everyone any other way.
dressing room—A small room, usually attached to a bedroom, in which a husband or wife might dress.
drill—A drill was a little furrow. The name was also given to the tool used for sowing seed in such furrows.
dripping—The grease that dripped out of cooked meat. It was used by the poor instead of butter.
dropsy—A symptom rather than a disease. Limbs swelled up with liquid as a consequence of diseases like diabetes or emphysema.
drover—Someone who drove cattle or sheep to market.
drugget—A carpetlike covering made of wool for floors or tables.
duck—A linen or cotton material used for sails and for sailors’ clothing.
ducks and drakes—The English term for skipping stones across the surface of the water. Used to denote throwing away one’s chances at something in a similarly carefree and heedless manner. David Copperfield’s great-aunt Betsey Trotwood notes of her husband that “he soon made ducks and drakes of what I gave him, sank lower and lower.”
duel—Killing a man in a duel was murder in England. Which explains why in Phineas Finn the protagonist has to go abroad to fight his opponent. Until about the 1840s, however, convictions were rare, since juries understood that a gentleman simply could not overlook certain slights. “There are positions which require Duels, I really think,” Her Majesty the Queen observed wistfully at one point, “& many Gentlemen have said the same.”
dustman—The man who came around to empty out the dustbins into which London households emptied the ashes from their grates and any other refuse. The dust was then collected into great big heaps which were sifted for valuables and other items.
Dutch—Often used to mean German, as a corruption, presumably, of deutsch.
Dutch clock—A clock favored by the poor, consisting basically of a clock face and a pendulum unit.
Dutch oven—A reflecting device that could be put in front of a fireplace to allow baking.
dyspepsia—Indigestion. It made one cranky and so the term came to be applied by analogy to crankiness in general.
earnest money—Money paid as a first installment of part of a bargain, especially by a farmer or the master of a household hiring a servant at a hiring fair.
earth—A fox’s den.
earthenware—Something made of clay that had been baked.
Easter term—One of the terms of either the law courts in London or Oxford and Cambridge.
East India—India when under British rule was originally run by a private company, the East India Company, until the British government took over in the wake of the Mutiny in 1857.
East Indiamen—Large, well-appointed ships that bore travelers and cargo back and forth between India and Britain. Never particularly troubled with finding excellent captains, since the captains were permitted to trade on their own accounts and thereby make their fortunes.
eat—This present tense of the word was often used perfectly “properly” by respectable people to mean “ate.”
eat one’s terms—To study for the bar. One had to show up for a certain number of meals at the Inns of Court in order to be “called to the bar,” presumably so that within the small, insular society that then characterized the London legal profession, the senior barristers could get to know one well enough to decide whether or not one should be permitted to become a barrister.
eating house—Cheap restaurants; generally, it seems, a step or so below coffeehouses.
ecarte—At one time a popular gambling game, usually played with two players but often with bystanders betting on the game, a deck being used from which the 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 were removed.
Ecclesiastical Commission—An official commission created in 1836 to redress imbalances in the salaries of clergy, cathedral endowments and other allocations of money within the Church of England.
elder—A kind of tree. El
der wine, a supposedly medicinal beverage, was made from its berries.
electors—The people who elected a parliamentary candidate in a borough or county. Until 1872, they had to cast their vote by public declaration—no secret ballot nonsense—which meant that the kinds of riotous goings-on that characterized the Eatanswill election in Pickwick were not uncommon.
Embankment—A massive public works project in London in the late 1860s. It involved replacing the shore on the north side of the Thames between the old city of London and Westminster with a thick concrete rampart a mile in length and some forty feet high. It was lined with trees and “has magnificent stone terraces with stone stairs to enable wayfarers,” wrote an American observer in 1870, “who seek transportation up and down the river, to get on and off the numerous ferry boats that swarm and ply all over the Thames from Richmond to Rotherhithe.”
embody—The term used to designate the calling up of the militia, which were summoned during the Napoleonic Wars and then briefly during the 1850s.
ensign—The lowest commissioned rank in the British infantry until 1871, when it was replaced with the rank of second lieutenant. The ensign was the young soldier who carried the flag (or ensign) into battle.
entail—Entail was a legal term meaning that a landed estate was tied up in such a way that the person inheriting it would have only its income—and could not sell or mortgage it. Along with primogeniture, it was the legal basis of the British aristocracy’s ability to transmit their great estates intact down through the centuries.
epergne—A great, hideous candlesticklike affair that stood in the middle of Victorian dinner tables and occasionally held flowers or food but was mainly there to look impressive.
Epsom Downs—The location of the Derby, in Surrey, south of London.
equipage—A term generally used to denote a horse and carriage, sometimes also the accompanying servants as well.
equity—One of the two kinds of nonecclesiastical law. Originating as an antidote to the rigidities and unfairness of the common law, equity was administered by the king’s chancellor or secretary through what eventually became the Chancery Court. In broad terms, common law looked to the letter of the law, equity more to the spirit. By the 1800s, “Chancery” had become almost synonymous with waste and procrastination.
escritoire—A writing desk with space in it for writing implements and paper.
Epergne.
esquire—A title conferring no rights or privileges but simply an intangible sort of dignity and, theoretically, membership in the landed gentry of one who had no other title. In another view, it was supposedly to be used only by justices of the peace, barristers, military officers and such, although after a while anyone who wanted to seem respectable used it.
Established church—The name given to the Church of England because it was established as the official church of England by parliamentary legislation. In the course of the 1800s there arose a Dissenting movement to disestablish it.
euchre—A game of cards popular in the United States played generally with 32 cards (no 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, or 6s), sometimes with 24 or 28 cards.
Evangelicalism—A movement that arose in the Church of England in the late 1700s to reform what its adherents felt was a church that was becoming dangerously lax. Leaning to Calvinism, it opposed the rather loose sexual mores of the Regency period, alcoholic excess, and frivolity and happiness of most kinds, but no doubt also contributed to many Church of England priests taking their duties seriously for a change. The “national” schools it inspired were a major force in impelling England toward a national elementary school system. Dickens detested the Evangelicals and in the person of characters like Murdstone or Chadband made them out to be contemptible.
execution—The seizure of a person or his goods pursuant to a court order.
exhibition—A university scholarship obtained through competitive exams.
expectations—A word that in addition to its usual meaning denoted the strong likelihood of inheriting wealth from someone. This gives the title of Dickens’s great novel, of course, a double meaning.
express—A special messenger or his message.
extinguisher—A cone-shaped device used to extinguish candles. The Ghost of Christmas Past appears to Scrooge with light shining from its head “which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, an extinguisher for a cap.” Scrooge tries to “extinguish” the spirit with it at the end of its visit. There was another, larger kind of extinguisher fastened to the railings of town houses in which linkboys could douse their torches.
facing—A term used to describe the different kind of material put over a cuff or collar on a piece of clothing, or that you see when a cuff or collar is turned over, particularly in the British military when cuffs or lapels were often of a different color from the rest of a uniform.
fag—A term used at English public schools to denote a younger boy who ran errands and did menial chores for an older one. It carried no connotations of homosexual activity. The term seems to have come from a word that meant to do small, tiresome chores and become fatigued thereby. Jane Eyre, for example, speaks in a nonpublic school context of “ceaseless reprimand and thankless fagging.”
faggot—A group of sticks tied together to be used for fuel.
fairing—A small present or gift, either won at a fair or given at one.
fall—Sometimes “fall in.” A verb used to denote the coming to an end of something such as an annuity or the tenure of an incumbent in a living.
fallow—Farmland left temporarily unplanted.
fancy man—A boyfriend. In the big bad city the term also meant a pimp, but no respectable Victorian novelist would have used the term that way in his or her writing.
Fanny—Nickname for Frances, a popular girl’s name.
farden—Slang for a farthing.
faro—A gambling game. Players bet on the order in which cards would turn up when dealt from the top of a deck. The dealer used a faro box—a machine with a spring inside that popped up the cards so that they could be extracted and read.
farrier—A blacksmith, and sometimes one who was a veterinarian as well.
farrow—A litter of pigs.
farthing—A coin worth one quarter of a penny.
father-in-law—See in-law.
fell—A desolate area in the hills.
fellow—A member of the fellows of a college at Oxford or Cambridge, the fellows constituting the governing body of the college. To become a fellow necessitated getting honors as an undergraduate, in return for which one received a stipend that was generally for life. Tutors were drawn from among the fellows.
femme de chambre—A lady’s maid or a chambermaid.
fen—Low, swampy, ground. The Fens was an area in and around Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire.
fender—A small protective border around the bottom of a grate to keep sparks and coals from falling out onto the floor. People are always putting their feet up onto it in Victorian novels.
Fenians—Finn was a mythological Irish hero. The Fenians were a revolutionary Irish organization dedicated to freeing Ireland of British rule who borrowed his name.
ferrule—A piece of metal put around or over the end of a ruler or something similar to keep it from weakening or splitting.
fete—A large fancy party. A fete champetre was a fancy party held outdoors.
fichu—A kind of cloth used as a head or shoulder covering by women.
field—In horse racing, the “field” consisted of all the horses running except the one favored. In fox hunting, the “field” meant the riders.
fieldfare—A little thrush of the fields about ten inches long.
figure—As opposed to an isolated dance step, a figure was really a sequence of related steps in a dance, typically in a country-dance or quadrille.
filbert—A hazel nut. The dormouse was sometimes called the filbert mouse because it liked them so much. One school of thought says the name comes from St.
Philibert, who had his festival in the nut-gathering season. St. Philibert seems to have had poorer luck getting churches and schools named after him than other saints.
fingerpost—English road signs at crossroads were often in the shapes of hands with pointing fingers.
fire screen—A screen used to shield people from the heat of a fireplace. Especially useful at dinner parties in rooms heated only by a fire when one wanted to warm guests on the other side of the room yet not fry those sitting closest to the fire. Also used to keep sparks off the floor. A pastime of nineteenth-century ladies was to paint them decoratively; Elinor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility “painted a very pretty pair of screens for her sister-in-law, which being now just mounted and brought home, ornamented her present drawing-room.” There were also small hand screens used for the same heat-shielding purpose as the large ones.
first floor—What the English called the “first floor” is the “second floor” in the United States. The English called the floor level on which one entered from the street the “ground floor” rather than the “first floor.”
first rate—See rate.
fiver—A five-pound note.
fives—A sport that involved whacking the ball with one’s hand against the front of a three-wall court.
flagon—One drank alcohol from it. It had a spout, a handle, and usually a lid.
flag officer—An admiral, vice admiral, or rear admiral, so named because they were each entitled to fly a flag from their respective ship, which—for that reason—was known as the flagship.
flail—The wooden device used to thresh corn in the days before mechanical threshing machines like the one that made life miserable for Tess Durbeyfield. Sometimes everyone stood in a circle with their flail and “flailed away” at the stalks of corn, trying to separate the grain at the end from the rest of the stalk.
flannel—A heavy, warm woolen cloth.
flax—In the 1800s, everyone always describes lovely young girls or handsome boys as having hair like flax. It was the plant from which linen was made. It had blue flowers and seeds that could be turned into linseed oil.